Programmable Tools for Teaching Data Literacy in Social Studies Classes

Aryan Banerjee

Pronouns: he/him/his

Research Mentor(s): Mark Guzdial, Professor
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Computer Science and Engineering / Engineering Education Research, College of Engineering
Presentation Date: Thursday, April 22, 2021
Session: Session 2 (11am – 11:50am)
Breakout Room: Room 16
Presenter: 6

Event Link

Abstract

A missed opportunity in K-12 education is the introduction of computer science principles and data literacy. The research project, Computing for Data Literacy, aims to give educators the ability to teach data literacy in their social studies classrooms. This is a design based research project in which we are introducing a potential solution to a problem and then analyzing how well our solution works. This is different from traditional hypothesis testing research. Our solution is through the prototype web tool named DV4L, “Data Visualization for Learning”. DV4L allows for students to ask historical driving questions and then get the relevant data visualizations so they can inquire about the answer. The contribution that my team and I are making is tracking the activity of each user on the website to determine whether they are gaining educational curiosity. My team and I make sure to never attach student identification information to our log files as to maintain the privacy of the students.”Gaining educational curiosity” is measured through many different fields. First, the student would be gaining educational curiosity if they were asking driving questions that were out of the syllabus or assignment given to them. It also tracks whether they write down notes to go along with their new graphs. Lastly, it also checks if the students were looking inside the underlying script, or source code, for each of their graphs. With those measures and more we are going to be able to analyze whether students are benefiting from data visualizations. This project is still ongoing, and we are hoping to have our tools in actual classroom settings sometime this semester.

Authors: Aryan Banerjee
Research Method: Computer Programming